As I already explained in the first Usability Terms article, consistency goes a long way in ensuring a pleasurable user experience in graphical user interfaces. While some user interfaces appear to be more graphically consistent than others, Windows has always appeared to be worse than most others - probably because it carries with it stuff that dates back to the 16bit era. IStartedSomething agrees with this, and started the Windows UI TaskForce.

I don't think you know a thing about programming. The remaining Win3.1 dialogs are very scarce on functionality and even if they where as complex as the fixed size system dialogs... it is the functionality that is the vast majority of the work, making *all* those dialogs resizable can't be more than a day of work for an average capable programmer, even if they are done directly on Win32 API. You can't seriously tell me that you think they couldn't afford one day of one programmers valuable time to do that.

An Vista Ultimate Retail license costs more than an complete PC in Europe. I think for that price they could at least pretend that they would give a crap about quality.

You know, Apple can. I didn't switch because their stuff got so unresistible much better, it is because Microsofts products have become so unbearable much worse... i could have lived with the status quo, quality wise.

I'm a software engineer for a living. I stopped reading your post after that because I'm sure the rest of it's garbage too. I wrote my post because I do understand software and the development life cycle and how many resources it takes to do one small thing, especially on such a large product.

Well, then it is that which i prefer on writing FOSS... when something is broken, i fix it. If there is a bug that slipped through QA from such a thing i rather have betatesters complain than dragging a pile of garbage from the early nineties along.

If Microsofts Managers are so stubborn that they don't allow resources on getting something done that was an *major* embarrassment even eight years ago, then clearly they are doomed.